UKPolitics

How we should regulate Data Centres

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“The destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.” – Charles Stross (Accelerando)

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

There’s an increasingly loud uprising happening in Scotland around AI data centres. Possibly the biggest I’ve seen since the 2016 uproar over shale gas fracking.

Data centre companies are actively lobbying the Scottish Government as we speak and are basically asking for John Swinney to open the gates to them to flood Scotland with as many data centres as he’s willing to make us all swallow. It’s easy to see what the companies get out of it. Scotland has plenty of space, a good amount of water and while electricity prices are high they can often negotiate preferential rates that we could only dream of. What does Scotland get out of it? Higher energy prices, higher demand on increasingly scare water, about three-and-a-half jobs, and the Scottish Government gets to claim that the “inwards investment” line goes up?

Perhaps I can see why Swinney would take that deal.

Most insidiously, the companies appear to be lobbying to write their own environmental laws. Just as with Freeports, their goal will be to effectively deregulate themselves either by getting specific exemptions from regulations or for the Government to allow themselves to internally self-regulate without outside interference (which would amount to the same thing).

“I’m pretty sure that none of the suggestions I’m about to make are in any way objectionable to anyone who doesn’t want to actively harm Scotland’s people or environment.”

We should demand that the Government holds them to the highest possible standards. I can give you a few bullet points and ideas to take to your MSPs – whether or not you have a data centre looming over you at the moment. I’m pretty sure that none of the suggestions I’m about to make are in any way objectionable to anyone who doesn’t want to actively harm Scotland’s people or environment.

1) Energy

In order that the energy demands of the data centre do not increase prices for the people of Scotland, to be approved, a data centre must meet at least one and possibly more of the following:

a) The data centre must be entirely off-grid and powered with zero-carbon energy. This must include emergency backups such as batteries as we do not want to repeat the case being seen in America where a lack of grid connections is prompting data centre companies to install massively polluting private gas and diesel generators.

b) If grid-connected, the data centre must fund the construction of enough zero-carbon energy generators to meet its own projected needs. These generators must be installed and operating before the data centre is allowed to draw energy from the grid.

c) The data centre company must fund the construction of enough zero-carbon energy generators, with those constructed generators being donated free-of-charge to Scottish public or community ownership to offset the demands the centre will make on the grid. An alternative or complement to this would be the data centre company installing, at their own cost, rooftop solar panels on Scottish homes starting with homes living in fuel poverty.

2) Heat

The waste heat from a data centre must be captured and redirected into a local District Heating Network. If a heat network is not currently installed in the local area, the centre must be designed to plug into such a network when one becomes available. In this case, funding the construction of such a network may be counted as a contribution towards energy infrastructure requirements.

3) Water

The data centre must “do no harm” to water systems. Any water drawn from municipal networks must occur only after local residential and other essential needs are met, with the company funding the construction of additional strengthening of the water network if necessary. Additionally, waste water from the data centre must not be released into the environment or into waste networks in a less than human drinkable state.

4) Materials

In addition to usual planning requirements around local jobs and material supply, the data centre – both the building itself and the materials for the computers inside – must be designed to Net Zero and to Circular Economy standards. All materials (especially those containing critical minerals such as the computers) must be designed to minimise waste and to be reused, repurposed or remanufactured into commercial-grade products at the end of their useful life. All materials that cannot be repurposed must be compostable or fully recyclable. No materials should go to landfill or incineration.

5) Social costs

The owners shall recognise the social harms their centres and the products they are used for may cause. All social costs shall be calculated (this will include but not be limited to carbon emissions, other pollution, displacement of jobs and breaches of IP laws). The cost of these harms will be placed in bond by the company as a condition of planning approval and the bond shall be insured with unlimited liability against overruns.

Additionally, if the computers within the centre are involved in criminal activity not directly attributable to an individual (such as mass IP breaches or hacks involving rogue AIs) then the Directors of the data centre company shall accept legal liability as if they had personally committed, aided or abetted said crimes.

Will Scotland do this?

I certainly don’t think any of the conditions above are particularly controversial so I believe that the Scottish Government should be able to support these or similar as certain minimum conditions. If the data centres can meet them, then we can move on to asking questions about what use they will actually be used for and how that use will benefit the people of Scotland.

This answer to this question will be different for, for example, a centre handling NHS patient data to avoid sending that data to privacy hostile nations like the USA than it will be for an AI hyperscaler owned by a equality hostile US billionaire. In either case though, the buildings themselves have the potential to cause great harm and this must be minimised and prevented. If they can’t do this, they should not be built.

Six more ideas to revitalise the high street

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.” – Miranda July

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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A photo of an above-shop flat in a high street in Glasgow. The building, apart from the shop, is entirely boarded up.

Andy Burnham’s tenure as UK PM hasn’t exactly been a fast take-off. He’s kept many of the more objectionable policies from the Starmer government and his ministerial appointments have been a mixed bag. His attitude towards constitutional reform has been similarly mixed. On one hand telling English regions that he wants to decentralise the UK, on the other telling them that he’ll centralise that power into the hands of mayors. On one hand telling Scotland that he will not discuss constitutional reform, on the other musing about codifying the UK’s constitution in a way that may give Scotland a codified exit mechanism from our voluntary union….or may make secession explicitly illegal or practically impossible.

He’s made some positive policy announcements though many of them have been cost-free or very inexpensive (at a UK level, anything that costs less than about £1 billion a year is a budgeting rounding error). One of those was made this week and while it’s small, it’s actually pretty good. He wants to make it easier for councils to regulate the opening of vape shops and betting shops so that he can revitalise high streets.

As a policy, it’s fine. Councils should have full subsidiarity over their local planning decisions and that they didn’t was a major oversight. Personally, I’d prefer that addictive products were regulated even further with things like vapes being reclassified as medical devices to be prescribed to those trying to quit smoking or, at the very least, sold in government owned stores the way strong alcohol is in many countries in Europe and elsewhere.

But if we just want to stick with better planning policy, that’s still a positive step. However, if Burnham seriously wants to revitalise high streets then there are other policies he could implement too. And yes, many of the policies I’m going to discuss are devolved issues so if Burnham doesn’t want to do them, Scotland could get on with it in his stead.

1) Redevelop high streets so that there are more people walking around them instead of cars driving through them.

One of the biggest drivers of custom to small businesses in High Streets is the ability for passers-by to just drop in. This is difficult to do if you’re driving past at 30mph and streets simply cannot be made in a way that allows for mass car parking outside the shops. Wherever this has been done, it contributes to lower pedestrian footfall and even fewer customers. Instead, converting roads to pedestrian-only or, at the very least, pedestrian-first streets allows for people to drop in to shops, even those they didn’t come to the high street specifically for.

2) Tax and regulate predatory online platforms like Amazon that push up prices and crush local businesses.

Cory Doctorow has written many times over many years about the predatory nature of online platforms like Amazon. It’s not just the ease-of-use of online shopping that means we don’t need to leave the house any more (believe me…I enjoy that too), but it goes worse than that. Amazon has a history of jacking up platform fees and forcing marketers to pay even more to ensure their product appears near the top of the search list.

Then Amazon copies their product and sells a knock-off version themselves (they can easily undercut on price because they don’t need to pay themselves platform fees, and they can adjust their own search algorithm to ensure that their products always appear top of the list). Worse, they’ve been known to enforce price controls such that if you try to sell your product in your own physical store at a lower price, they’ll kick you off Amazon.

So when you do go into the a shop, you might end up paying a price including platform fees. Rather than making goods cheaper, Amazon makes everything, everywhere more expensive, and then they still rip merchants off and steal their sales. We need to better regulate online platforms and properly tax them. Personally, I’d regulate such that a company that provides an online marketplace cannot also sell their own products on that market. They can either own the market, or they can sell through it – not both.

3) Bring vacant high-street houses back into use.

An interesting fact emerges in our increasing xenophobic politics. It is becoming received wisdom that immigrants are competing for houses and are pushing out native-born families and homeless households. This is, to put it bluntly, total crap. The problems in the housing sector are much more being driven by housing developers who drip-feed construction in order to keep their own profits high.

Another issue though is vacant housing. There are about 7,000 asylum seekers in Scotland right now. There are about 34,000 homeless households in Scotland. There are about 89,000 long term vacant homes in Scotland. This means that if we really wanted to, we could give every asylum seeker in Scotland, every homeless household TWO homes each…and there would still be more than 7,000 empty homes in Scotland.

Many of the empty homes in Scotland are flats sitting above high street shops. These are often cheaper to renovate up to appropriate standards as compared to building a brand new house somewhere – by some estimates, it might be possible renovate three houses for the price of one new one. Doing this would bring people into the heart of the high street and turn them into thriving 15 minute neighbourhoods. This, in turn, would bring entrepreneurs close to their place of work and close to their customers.

4) Pay workers enough and reduce their rent/utility bills enough so that they can afford to shop based on local quality instead of cheapest import.

Have you been feeling the pinch in terms of affordability lately? I know I have (reminder, Common Weal is almost entirely funded by small donations of an average of £10/month). Even where wages have somewhat kept up with inflation, there seems to be some data coming in that there is a shift in what we spend out money on.

This is going to be a bit of a research for me in the near future (right after a slightly different report on affordability currently in the pipeline..and another project that I’ll be talking about soon) but looking at data on what we actually spend our money on appears to be revealing that a greater percentage of that money is vanishing into rents/mortgages and energy bills. It’s no wonder therefore that we have to cut back on “discretionary spending”.

I certainly eat out far less often than I used to. And if we want a high street of local businesses, we can’t assume that they’ll be able to compete on cost with cheap imports. If we want people to buy quality goods or have quality experiences in the high street then we need to pay workers more and we need to aggressively reduce rents and utility bills so that people have more to spend and it doesn’t cost businesses so much to deliver their services.

“High Streets should be the heart of our towns and cities. They should be the places within our 15 minute neighbourhoods where we choose to go for most of our needs.”

5) More low emission zones and re-naturing of urban spaces to make them more comfortable to be in, especially during heat waves.

I was in Glasgow recently for the first time in several months and something struck me – the city was a lot quieter than I remembered. It wasn’t entirely down to reduced footfall either, the volume of traffic in the city was greatly reduced and the noise the vehicles were making was much less too. A good chunk of this is the transition to electric vehicles and legislation like the Low Emission Zone which keeps nosier combustion engines out of the area.

It also makes the air much cleaner. I remember the days working in our office in Union Street (a building that is now sadly lost to the recent fire – see the point above about regulating vape shops) and I remember getting to the end of the day with the rasp in my lungs due to the exhaust fumes. Imagine then living in that space. Air pollution is one of the biggest killers in our society and it makes even visiting a dense area like a high street simply unpleasant to be in at best and an active health hazard at worse. This goes double as the climate emergency bites further and our cities get hotter and more unsafe.

We could revitalise high streets by making them urban oases. We should Green our cities to provide shade, actively prevent heat islands and pull pollution out of the air while at the same time double down on LEZ legislation to reduce that pollution in the first place. Ignore the far-right and other climate deniers who claim to be fighting for ‘freedom’. Their promises to repeal low emission zones should be called out for what they are – policies that will kill thousands of people every year.

6) Create more deconsumerised community spaces.

I want you to think about your local area. Think about a place where you can go where you could: a) Accidentality meet someone you know. b) Stay as long as you like. c) Not have to make a purchase either to get in or once you’re there.

It’s quite likely that the place you’re thinking about is a park (unless you’re in England and it has an entry fee) or a library. It might be a museum. Maybe an art gallery? Might it even be a set of concrete steps? Does your community have any of those kinds of spaces? A major draw to the high street must be to do something other than to spend money.

We should be able to spend time there too, without having to spend money. Whatever the revitalised High Street has – men’s sheds, drop-in centres, community kitchens, art galleries, maker spaces so that locals can make art for the gallery, or whatever – we should be able to enjoy ourselves there in a multitude of different ways.

Conclusion

As hinted above, many of these suggestions are actually issues devolved either to Holyrood or to local authorities so, in Scotland, they aren’t Andy Burnham’s to do. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done though. I’ll even throw in a secret seventh idea – one perhaps a bit more radical as I don’t necessarily approve of the gambling aspect within it.

In 1950s Taiwan where businesses were largely dealing in cash and were hiding their sales volumes to avoid tax, the government brought in an “invoice lottery”. Customers would get a lottery ticket printed on their receipts that would pay out a share of revenue from business rates. Now customers had a vested interest in businesses creating an official paper trail and revenue shot up – more than paying for the lottery. The scheme is still popular to this day.

With efforts to part-devolve VAT to Scotland still underway, perhaps we could do something similar. Perhaps Scottish-owned high street businesses could be registered for a similar state-owned invoice lottery – shop Scottish, maybe win a prize! As I say, I’m not keen on gambling myself, but it might well be a good nudge to choose a local high street shop over a bigger chain, even one next door.

High Streets should be the heart of our towns and cities. They should be the places within our 15 minute neighbourhoods where we choose to go for most of our needs – not just our shopping but to meet people and take part in our community. Letting them rot vacant or, worse, letting them get homogenised under the crushing weight of private equity does us no good as a society or for our economy.

Andy Burnham has started his tenure with a series of small but generally positive steps. He’s going to have to ramp up beyond the small if he wants to get anywhere (hint: calling a COBRA meeting to discuss the English drought and heatwaves and coming out after with a proposal to consider banning disposable BBQs isn’t looking beyond the small) but if he’s willing to make those small steps or even just a large series of those small steps then we could get somewhere positive.

And if he doesn’t, well – maybe Scotland should stop waiting for him to walk and start running ahead instead.

John Swinney Is Acting Like a Climate Denier

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.”
But I don’t want your hope.
I don’t want you to be hopeful.
I want you to panic.
I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.
And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire.
Because it is.”
– Greta Thunberg

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There was a time when Scotland was proud of its climate credentials. The first national government in the world to declare a Climate Emergency, followed by many of its local councils. Setting ambitious, legally binding targets to reach Net Zero well ahead of the promises being made by peer countries. Even being the first nation in the world to officially admit that the Global North had a responsibility to repair and compensate Global South nations because of the damage we had and were causing to them.

I will grant you that Common Weal has been rightly critical of the actions that proceeded from these words. You should always watch what a politician does rather than what they say.

Scotland declared a Climate Emergency, then tried to avoid changing policies to match the severity of the problem – like someone who response to their home having a Roof Fire Emergency by turning off the gas stove then going back to bed.

The legally binding targets were legally bound but with no clear policy pathway to meeting them. The climate promises made, if added together, would not have created a Net Zero Scotland and we all knew that promises would be broken along the way so that the actual additive impact of actions would fall short by even further.

And while Scotland did put some cash into the fund for Global climate loss and damage, the amount was well short of the actual damage Scotland has caused. Scotland’s bill for our share of global climate emissions amount to something like £2.5 billion per year, every year until we reach Net Zero. Scotland promised a total of £100 million for the fund across just two pledges.

Still. Contrast those lofty promised followed by half-hearted actions with the current Government. This month, John Swinney has been campaigning hard on giving a massive tax bung to oil and gas companies. The same companies that have profited to the tune of trillions of pounds while setting the world on fire. The same companies that have actively lobbied to halt and prevent measures to stop them doing this. The same companies that even as they take more cash to help them make more profits are simultaneously shedding old assets in the same North Sea so that they don’t need to pay to decommission them.

It’s hard to show just how much of a U-turn this is for the Scottish Government but there is one thing that illustrates this.

Donald Trump – a man who vocally denies climate change and erroneously thinks that ‘windmills’ make people poorer and don’t exist in China, while actively waging illegal oil wars in the Middle East and Latin America – also believes that oil companies are making too much money. Right now, John Swinney is more extreme on oil subsidies than Donald Trump.

We can therefore safely assume – in the absence of actions to the contrary – that despite John Swinney serving in the Governments that made those previous commitments, he is himself is acting like a climate denier. He is looking at the Roof Fire Emergency and is actively turning all of the gas hobs to full burn before going back to bed.

I know that Trump isn’t claiming that oil companies are making too much money because he’s secretly a ‘nationalise all assets’ communist who has a strong moral conviction in public good. It’s because he wants the money for himself because if he isn’t personally benefiting from any ‘deal’ then he thinks he’s being taken advantage of and the last thing he wants to be is a ‘loser’.

“Our Common Home Plan remains the most comprehensive blueprint for a Scottish Green New Deal.”

Swinney doesn’t have this excuse though. He should know better. Actions speak far louder than words though and right now we’re seeing the actions of a man calling for oil companies to be able to make even more obscene profits at the expense of the planet at the same time that wildfires are raging through the Cairngorms and heatwaves have killed thousands of people in Britain this summer alone (never mind the thousands more across Europe and even more globally).

I know he still claims to cling to the policy that he’d only approve of new oil and gas extraction if it met certain “climate criteria” but he is yet to lay out what he thinks those criteria would be and whether he thinks any new extraction would pass it. What, precisely, does he think a “Net Zero” oil well would look like?

If I’m wrong and John Swinney is not a climate denier, if he does, in fact, still believe that we’re living in Climate Emergency and that emergency has only gotten worse since his government declared it, then I expect to see another set of actions. I expect him to endorse Monica Lennon’s proposed Ecocide Bill when it returns to Parliament and then to start aggressively prosecuting people who are committing ecocide. I expect him to align all public policy with what the science says Scotland must do to meet our obligations under the climate emergency.

Common Weal has already shown what he can do. Our Common Home Plan remains the most comprehensive blueprint for a Scottish Green New Deal. Following it through to its conclusion would lead us to a world where oil barons no longer have the power to lobby politicians for their own profit because that world simply won’t contain oil barons. This is, of course, why those oil barons continue to try to make sure politicians don’t take those actions.

Right now, John Swinney is taking the actions of a climate denier on behalf of those oil barons. If he wants his political legacy to be something other than that, he knows what he needs to do.

Why Andy Burnham won’t reform Council Tax either

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are — a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.” – Ha-Joon Chang

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Something interesting almost happened down south that would have had major ramifications if it had. It didn’t, and thus we probably now go back to politics as usual, but the reason we couldn’t see some positive change is worth exploring.

A group of MPs in Northern England tried to lobby new Prime Minister Andy Burnham on a plan to reform Council Tax in England. They proposed replacing it (and Stamp Duty) either with some rather undefined Land Value Tax or with a more rigorously defined Property Tax based on the present value of a home (unlike Council Tax which is a banded tax that is based on what your home might have been worth in the early 1990s). The Property Tax proposal is a bit more defined, setting the tax at a single national rate of 0.48% of a house’s present market value.

This is very similar to our own Property Tax proposal which set an illustrative national rate of 0.63% as that would have been the rate in 2020 (and in 2025 when we recalculated it) that would raise the same amount of revenue across Scotland as does the present Council Tax. Of course, we are very clear that local councils should control their own local taxes and that includes setting the rates as well as defining subsidies (such as for single-occupancy or low income) and surcharges (e.g. for multiple home ownership).

I don’t know if the Northern MP proposal aims for revenue neutrality. I suspect that it is actually a bit too low for that, particularly as they also want to fold Stamp Duty (the English equivalent of our Land and Buildings Transaction Tax) into it. A couple of things swing towards that lower number though. The first is that houses in England are generally more expensive than in Scotland. The second is that Council Tax in the richest parts of England is particularly low. I mention this in my article in In Common this week but there’s a townhouse in Mayfair, London on the market for just shy of £50 million. It’s a Band H property but will pay just £2,100 per year in Council Tax. This is just over twice what I pay in my Band A house in South Lanarkshire. Council Tax is just about the most unfair tax in Britain and the one most desperately in need of reform.

This also shows why it is so difficult to reform. Not because it’s technically challenging (my In Common article lays out how we’d go about revaluing houses using data we already have) nor because people are against it (the vast majority of people in Scotland want to see it reformed) but because of the specific people who don’t want reform because it would negatively affect them personally.

Our Property Tax proposal, if set at a national revenue neutral rate, would result in a tax cut for every house worth approximately £400,000 or less. This covers 90% of homes in Scotland. There are going to be examples of even more expensive homes that will pay less or break even under our scheme. A Band H house in Edinburgh worth £632,000 would break about even after the tax change (that kind of money would almost get you a three bed flat just north of The Meadows if you’re interested – though you could also get a substantially cheaper house elsewhere and donate the balance to Common Weal).

Houses more expensive than this have been underpaying their property taxes for over 30 years and everyone under this line have been subsidising them.

“The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.”

If we implemented the Common Weal Property Tax then my own house would see its tax due drop by about half. And this is before we even think about things like progressive taxation on more expensive properties with surcharges like “mansion taxes”. That £50 million house in Mayfair shouldn’t be paying £1,800 per year. Under the Northern MPs’ scheme, it would owe about £240,000 per year in Property Tax. Under the Common Weal plan, it would owe closer to £300,000 per year. Someone who puts £50 million in the bank could expect close to £2.5 million per year in interest. If they’re buying property as an investment rather than a “nice place to live” then they must be expecting to earn more than this otherwise a passive bank account would be much less hassle. In short, I’m saying that they can afford to pay a fair Property Tax.

But they won’t want to. And this is the reason that neither the SNP in Scotland nor Andy Burnham in England will reform Council Tax unless they are dragged kicking and screaming to the table to do it.

The problem isn’t that the top 10% outnumber the bottom 90% in numerical terms. It’s that they outnumber us in power.

What the very, very top have is lobbying power. They can afford to pay think-tanks (though, for obvious reasons, not us) to tell everyone why it would be a bad idea to tax them fairly. They can bankroll political campaigns. They can buy media outlets to tell us what we should think about their situation and how terrible it would be if they were taxed like the rest of us.

What the people just below them but above 90% of the rest of us have is voting power. They are the ones who consume those media outlets and use it to inform their vote. This Professional Class tends to consider themselves to be about average in our society rather than being amongst the bottom edge of the elite.

So what we get is a democracy where the 1% tells the 9% that they will be hard done by if their wealth taxes increase even a smidge and so the 90% must continue to subsidise them.

This isn’t just a UK problem, it happens in Scotland too. The Scottish Government currently has a “mansion tax” consultation out there that folk should respond to. For a £1m house, the proposed rate is actually almost exactly the equivalent of the 0.48% proposed by the Northern MPs but it only goes down from there. A £2m house would pay only 0.38% and that £50 million Mayfair Townhouse, if it was in Edinburgh, would pay an effective rate of just 0.015% (the extra zero is not a typo). Meanwhile, my wee house – which is amongst the cheapest 10%-15% of houses in Scotland – pays an effective Property Tax rate of 1.3% (again, not a typo). My property tax would be, under the Scottish Government’s “mansion tax” proposal, eighty-six times higher per pound of total value than someone who could afford to buy what would be the most expensive house in Scotland.

So no, I’m nor surprised that Burnham bottled the chance to fix the mess that Council Tax is just as I’m not surprised that the Swinney continues to do so. This isn’t an excuse for them to change tack though. Or to admit failure and tell us who’ll do it for them instead.

England isn’t going to steal Scotland’s water

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” – Terry Pratchett

This is an original post, not published elsewhere. If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A viral image of an OS-style map showing a water pipeline running from Inverness to London

There’s an image going viral around Scottish nationalist circles right now about hypothetical plans to build an aqueduct to move water from Scotland to England. There are grains of rationality behind it. England is suffering widespread and worsening droughts due to climate change, Scotland still has reasonably abundant water and low demand, at least one UK Prime Minister has actively floated the idea in the past, and there is a long history of Scottish resources being exported from Scotland without the people of Scotland being adequately compensated.

The problem with this idea is that it won’t work – the physics is against it.

For water to flow under gravity, there needs to be a minimum gradient. Current British water pipe standards suggest about 1:100 as a rough rule of thumb – for every 100m the conduit runs horizontally, it needs to drop 1m vertically. The shallowest Roman aqueducts ran at 1:1,000 though they clogged up pretty quickly without constant maintenance. The longest Roman aqueduct – about a 5th of the length of this proposal – had a gradient of about 1:660 along much of its course.

The straight-line distance between Aberdeen and London is 720km. This means the pipe at Inverness would need to be between 720m-7,200m above sea level to drop the water down to London. If your reservoir is on top of a Munro and you can build like a Roman, you might make it so long as there are no other hills in the way. If you build to British water standards, I doubt you will.

Ah, but we have pumps! Pumps can lift water back up so you can make many small steps down instead on one large one. Yes. That’s the second issue. Pumps cost energy to run. To lift 1,000kg (1 cubic metre – enough for one household for 2-3 days) of water from sea level to between 720m and 7,200m and to transport it at a rate of 1 cubic metre per hour, will cost you between 2kWh and 20kWh. It doesn’t matter how much that costs or whether you get the power from fossil fuels or from solar panels, you still need that power.

To desalinate 1,000kg from sea water in the South East will cost you between 1kWh and 3.5kWh per cm/h.

Therefore, to make an aqueduct from Scotland to England economically viable [See Note] we need a) the capital costs of the longest aqueduct in the UK to be massively lower than that of a bunch of desalination plants and b) to build the pipes more efficiently than current British water standards.

And this is before we consider that a more effective means of supplying demand might be to introduce better, more local resource efficiency measures, to build more reservoirs to store water for the dry seasons or to nationalise the private water companies and prosecute the former directors to recover the costs to repair the leaking pipes.

We also need to consider that a transnational water conduit that the SE absolutely requires is going to be an absurd national security risk given that it could be burst open by a single drone anywhere along its length. Desalination plants are already vulnerable as we can see by the war crimes currently being committed by the US and Iran to that effect, but at least they can be distributed so that taking out one still means that some water can flow.

So no. England isn’t going to build an aqueduct to transport all of Scotland’s water away. It’s going to be much easier for England to build power cables to transport away Scotland’s energy to feed their desalinators instead.

Note:- There are extremely long water pipelines in the world – the longest feeds from a pressurised fossil aquifer so has a degree of head lift that surface water does not and others tend to drop down from mountains rather higher than Scotland’s.

There are also extremely long, economically viable pumped oil pipelines. Oil costs between a hundred and a thousand times more than water on a per litre basis, so the economics of energy use are very different.

How to make the sun shine at night

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“O, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.” – Roman Payne

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.

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The problem with renewable energy, we’ve been told for decades, is that it doesn’t work on the schedules of our choosing. Turbines don’t turn when there’s no wind. The sun doesn’t shine at night. And therefore we need fossil fuels and nuclear power plants. Only they are reliable enough to power our society 24 hours a day.

And so, even though we bake in the hottest year of our lives, again, and look forward to every year of the rest of our lives being even hotter. Even though thousands in Britain and thousands more across Europe will not now ever live to see a hotter year – the magnitude of death going almost unnoticed by the media in a way that it would not had it been an act of terrorism. Even as the same people who caused those deaths lobby our governments to let them cause more and make money doing so. Even as all that happens, we’re still told that renewables could never replace fossil fuels because the sun doesn’t shine at night.

What if it did though?

I’m not talking about the Techbro supervillain idea being trailed by an American company to put mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight. That won’t work, will only burn billions of dollars that could have been spent more sensibly and even if the mirrors launch they will cause untold damage to the environment, to scientific equipment like telescopes and will further wreck our shared Commons that is our view into space.

A much more down-to-Earth solution is, of course, batteries. Battery technology has come on faster than anyone – including renewable energy optimists – could have predicted. Twelve years ago, while Scotland was having its independence referendum, a grid-scale battery cost around $300 per kWh (a kilowatt.hour is a unit of stored energy – a 1kWh battery could run a 1kW electric heater continuously for one hour).

By 2019 when we published our Common Home Plan, the price had more than halved and was closing in on $100/kWh which was considered a major milestone in technological achievement (not for any real physical reason – humans just like round numbers). Now, batteries cost closer to $60/kWh and we’re starting to approach a real milestone. One that will really change the game in terms of how we use these things.

“Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to”

That milestone is $20/kWh. At $20, these batteries cross a threshold. Connected to enough solar panels to charge them (solar panels have also dropped in price by an astounding degree and now generate human-usable energy cheaper than any technology ever invented by humans going right back to when we first harnessed fire), a $20 battery is capable to delivering energy cheaper than coal, cheaper than nuclear and cheaper than gas.

With just solar panels and batteries, the economic case for burning fossil fuels at night disappears. The fact that batteries can ramp up their delivery very quickly also means that they can take over the job currently done by “peaker” gas turbines that kick in when there is sudden high demand for short periods of time. These peaker plants are the most expensive form of generation on the grid and so replacing them with cheap batteries will have a substantial impact on our energy bills as well as our environmental emissions.

Chinese company BYD has announced that it aims to be the ones to crack that threshold (with their rivals CATL trying to do similar). They are launching a $40/kWh battery next year with further improvements in the months after. Unlike the lithium batteries which have dominated the sector until now, the new battery will be based on sodium.

Sodium is safer to deploy (sodium fires aren’t great, but they’re not as runaway explosive as lithium fires are), easier to extract (you can get it from the salt in seawater) and is a lot cheaper and overall more plentiful than lithium. The major downside is that a sodium battery of a certain size will never store as much energy as the same size of lithium battery. This is a problem for electric vehicles (though sodium battery cars designed to make short hops within towns are coming online too) but less so for grid-scale batteries where space is less of a factor.

Crucially, for Scotland, sodium batteries have the advantage that we could make them here if we wanted to. Scotland doesn’t have substantial lithium deposits but we have plenty of salt in our seas!

Of course, the substantial delays in the kind of investment that Scotland should have been doing to make that happen mean that China has stolen a march on us as they have in so much else of the energy sector. It’s not too late for Scotland. As I said in a recent column (“Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do.”, The National, 26th February 2026), even if we’re forced to buy Chinese tech to push forward our green transition as urgently as we need to right now, we should also recognise that that tech has a finite lifespan of a few decades and so we should be investing now so that the tech we replace it with is manufactured domestically.

Environmentalists have predicted this moment for decades – decades that were stretched out longer because the oil barons convinced politicians to line their pockets a little longer – but economics now mean that it’s finally here. The transition is unstoppable. Renewables are the future we need. Scotland should work to be on the right side of that future rather than being left behind with the past.

On a reality-based security strategy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

There is an observation amongst peace-campaigners that politicians claim that there is never enough money to spend on social welfare but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war.

That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way. Now we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so the social welfare has to go to pay for it. The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.

This will have multiple impacts on public spending. The first is the impact of the direct cuts, as mentioned. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending – investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish budget but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn out of the transport budget and putting it into the military means an effective cut of £80mn to the Scottish budget. The third is that as a “job creation tool”, the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but spending £1bn on just about anything else – particularly things like energy infrastructure – would create even more jobs. It is likely that this defence plan will be net-negative for job growth. And that’s before we consider the final point – money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on. War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.

And this is all assuming that this is what the UK actually needs or should be doing right now. The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson rather ironically saying in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it.”

But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like to have, we need a reality-based security strategy.

The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem and it is now too late to prevent but not too late to limit or to adapt to. But doing so will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time. It’s not just the climate itself, but Trump’s illegal war with Iran and Putin’s with Ukraine has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we now have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted in the way those wars did to our fuel supplies. Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.

Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the ones recently spotted outside Holyrood last week. These are all policing matters rather than military though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.

The same goes for non-climate environmental threats. If we wanted a reality-based security strategy to consider the number of British people killed each year then we’d be waging war against pollution. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3,000 lives per year (I haven’t been able to find comparable data for Glasgow or Edinburgh’s LEZ impacts yet). If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3,000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. If a politician tried to win an election on the promise of murdering 3,000 people, I doubt they’d win a vote. And yet, there are politicians and political parties still claiming to want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.

Next on the threat scale is probably something like Hybrid War – unconventional attacks on our infrastructure via things like hacking attempts and drone warfare. The UK has, in fact, experienced attacks like this from state actors – we now know that Russia was likely behind the shutdown of Jaguar Land Rover last year. We also know that Trump’s USA has been actively spying on European Governments, digitally sanctioning human rights lawyers, and is quite capable of ordering Microsoft to lock down Scotland’s ability to pass legislation should he choose to. The threat from this kind of hybrid war isn’t therefore coming only from our “enemies” and cannot be defended against by building more bombs to aim at them. A reality-based security strategy would be following the EU’s lead and developing a digital sovereignty strategy to remove the threat of such hacks from the table. Common Weal are actively working on what a Scottish digital strategy could look like.

“If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.”

On the far side of the threat spectrum in terms of probability is actual territorial invasion which is vanishingly low for somewhere like Britain. The country being held up as a threat in this regard, Russia, has already shown the limits of its capabilities in Ukraine. It may well still be a threat on the borders of NATO, but that’s a very different prospect to the idea of seeing T-90 tank in Tottenham. Once again, when considering territorial invasion, we cannot ignore our supposed “ally” the USA, which is still threatening to annex Greenland. However, the thought does bring up the thing that has been absolutely missing from discourse on defence spending till now – time.

The new Starmer plan has a long time horizon. It will be years before the actual money starts to ramp up weapons production and development and decades before the results of that spending results in deployable equipment (this is particularly the case with things like nuclear weapons and new submarines to launch them). If we take as given that Putin’s Russia is the massive overbearing threat that the establishment would have us fear, then we have to remember that Putin himself is mortal and already past UK state retirement age. He will quite likely be dead or otherwise no longer in power before any of Starmer’s new weapons can be aimed at him. Who will replace him? What can the UK and Europe do now to normalise relations with his successor so that post-Putin Russia is not a threat? Would doing that be cheaper than us threatening to nuke Moscow, murdering 5 million civilians in the process? Might it work better?

Pacifists like myself are never listened to in times of peace. In times of war, we are openly scorned as not having the solutions to the conflict that could have been avoided had we been listened to in times of peace. Warmongers need war and the threat of war to justify their own existence and to bloat their already unjustifiable budgets and they must be called out on this fact. If we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead. If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers would prefer we were afraid of instead.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.

Workers aren’t lazy; they’re being left behind

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. – Bertrand Russell

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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You will probably know the story right now. That the way to get the UK’s economy growing is to get more people working. And the reason that they’re not working is because a bunch of young people are lazy, feckless and that people are faking mental illness to avoid work and sponge off the benefits system. Claims that the benefit bill now exceeds income tax revenue are flowing around right-wing media outlets to try to delegitimise the entire social security system.

The problem with the story is that much of it is flat out false and most of the rest is misleading to the point of meaninglessness.

To take that last claim head-on, Full Fact did a thorough debunking of it. The total UK social security ‘bill’ has been higher than income tax revenue for quite some time now, but even that point is utterly irrelevant. Income tax is not the only tax paid as a result of wages, National Insurance is too. So even if the benefit bill was only paid for out of direct taxation on worker wages, the claim would be false. But even that idea is itself wrong.

Direct income taxes aren’t hypothecated to pay for social security (not even National Insurance which only sits in a separate pot for historical reasons – all UK public spending comes out of the general Consolidated Fund). Saying that benefits are unsustainable because they cost the country more than it receives in income tax is precisely as illogical as saying that the UK’s military budget is unsustainable because it costs more than revenue from landfill taxes. National budgeting simply does not work like that (I’ll go into the MMT model of how national public budgeting for a currency-sovereign nation actually works another time).

The argument itself begs an important question. If the claim was true – what would its right-wing promoters want to do about it? ‘Cut benefits’, sure, but which ones? The state pension? Anything they personally claim? What kind of world do they think they would create if they ‘won’?

A similar story emerges when looking at young workers. A lot of newspaper lines have been written about unemployed people and feckless ‘NEETs’ who are neither working nor seeking work. To fix the economy, we’re told, those people need to be starved into working via benefits cuts.

Never mind that it won’t work (plenty of data shows that a Universal Basic Income – giving poor unemployed people more money, not less, is the key to improving life chances by allowing people to work under less duress or to improve their prospects through education and training rather than taking the only job that lets them eat tonight).

A large number of people who are ‘NEET’ are people who no reasonable person thinks should be told to drop what they’re doing and go work. The vast majority (in order of size of group) have a long term illness, are students, care for someone, or are retired while younger than state pension age.

What we’re actually seeing among vulnerable workers is a ladder being pulled away from them. There are currently approximately 700,000 job vacancies across the UK. There are approximately 1.8 million people currently unemployed (plus another million who are NEET). This means that there are about 2.5 people actively looking for work for every posted vacancy. This number rises to four people per job if you force the NEETs out to work regardless of their circumstances.

Those two numbers don’t equally divide into each other either. Employment isn’t fungible. A newly redundant senior civil servant isn’t going to take an entry level cafe job if they can help it. A newly graduated student isn’t going to walk into the vacancy left behind by the civil servant. Neither are going to think a job in Kent is going to be worth much to them if they both live in Inverness and can’t or don’t want to move. At some point this kind of ‘structural unemployment’ starts to matter more than the ‘frictional unemployment’ that happens when, for example, the laser engineer I used to be moves from one laser company to another.

“Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life.”

This means that it’s simply not a matter of cutting benefits till people squeak and go get a job if the job doesn’t exist for them to get.

And it’s about to get worse, especially for young workers. The latest figures show that not only are posted job vacancies not there, the number of jobs in the economy may be shrinking – around 100,000 jobs were lost in April this year, mostly in sectors like retail and food services. This paints a picture of households starting to cut back on eating out or even on how much they are buying as an economic system rocked by global instability starts to bite.

It’s not just the poor who need more money, it’s everyone else too – at least insofar as the current economic structure is concerned. If politicians want a growing economy based on consumerism, then they are going to need more consumers (immigration rates are falling again and the number of births and deaths in the UK is already nearly net-zero…) and those consumers are going to need more money to spend on consumption. This model of economics simply is not working and is about to come right off the rails even before the impacts of the Iran war and the rise of AI really start feeding through.

Common Weal will soon be publishing a new report looking in detail at the state of income and inequality in Scotland and the results are shocking but one of the most shocking results is the extent to which households fall below not the official poverty line but the line of a ‘minimum decent standard of living’. Even relatively well off households are struggling to raise kids to a decent standard. Beyond this paper we’re going to have to look at how we can pull even those households up not just through better jobs and more income but by changing the way the economy works.

If you can’t afford to buy books, it shouldn’t matter because we have more libraries. Your house should be a decent home at a decent price, not a leaking mould trap that your landlord is profiting from. And the basic infrastructure of your life, like energy, should be there to support you, not pad the profits of the shareholders of the equity funds that own your energy supplier.

Folk my age and younger were sold the dream that if we played the game and worked hard, we’d be rewarded by being able to get ahead in life. What we actually bought was hard work without the reward while still being blamed for not working hard enough by those who got the reward without even having to do the work.

This says that the entire game is rigged against us. Perhaps it’s time to play a different game.

If energy powers get devolved – what then?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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John Swinney has kicked of the election campaign with promise that should he be returned as First Minister then “on the first day” he’ll submit a Section 30 order to the UK Government to request the devolution of energy powers to Scotland.

I want to make something clear from the outset – Scotland should have more powers over energy and, given that Scotland holds a massively substantial share of the UK’s total renewable energy resources – the powers that do remain reserved should be jointly managed to a much greater degree than they are now.

The current bickering and grandstanding between governments combined with the, frankly, whining from either government that the other government is blocking progress as they see it serves none of us at a time when first the climate emergency and now escalating geopolitical turmoil is demanding that we get ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. To that extent, a campaign for more devolved powers is not just welcome, but vital.

This is not to say that I believe that a simple call for those powers via a Section 30 order will be successful. I don’t think it will be, for the same reason that the Section 30 order for independence referendum powers almost a decade ago was not successful. Governments and politicians will only do something that they do not want to do when the consequences of not doing so – as they see and feel them – are worse than the consequences of acquiescing. If they are told to do something and there is no credible answer to the inevitable response “or what?”, then they won’t.

But let’s assume that they do. Let’s imagine a scenario after May where the Scottish Government clearly won’t win a campaign for a second independence referendum (which would inevitably absorb all other campaign energy and would, if successful, win the powers over energy anyway) but there is scope to win a “more devolution” campaign, including or centred around energy. It might well come about due to the SNP failing to win a majority of seats in Holyrood (and thus failing in their self-imposed prerequisite for an indyref campaign) but there nonetheless being a strong pro-independence majority in Parliament coupled with voices on the other side who don’t favour independence but would welcome more powers over energy (so…not much different from the recent outgoing Parliament then?).

What then?

The powers over energy get devolved to Holyrood, but what then? What is the plan for using those powers? here

I know what Common Weal would do with them. We’ve written extensively on energy matters for over a decade now and have pulled in expertise from some of the top people in the field. We have papers on how to reform the Grid written by people who have helped to run national grids. We have papers on how to heat homes, written by people who have helping to define the standards by which home energy needs are measured. We understand that trying to decarbonise the economy we have today without fundamentally changing that economy is doomed to failure.

So we have our own answers to the question of what we’d do with devolved energy powers and you can hear about a few more of them in my recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast here and below.

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I’m not convinced that the present Scottish Government has fully thought their answer to that question through though. From what I can see there are promises of energy price cuts without elaboration as to how it’d happen, there’s a manufacturing sector based almost entirely around inwards investment – though the UK’s blocking of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory on “national security” grounds (read: “we didn’t want to upset Daddy Trump”) is appalling – and there remains the continued risk that vital improvements like the proposed PassivHaus energy efficiency standards will get watered down and compromised by people who profit massively from your heating bill.

I am greatly concerned that the current Scottish Government’s plan, such that it is, will not be the overhaul of the energy sector that it needs. It won’t be based around bringing the sector into public ownership. I suspect this because they haven’t used the powers they currently have to bring much of it into public ownership.

They’ve also made efforts to privatise energy infrastructure that was in public ownership for no reason other than it would boost the “inwards investment” line a bit more – Scotland’s ‘public’ electric car charging network is now operated by an Austrian company. The Government also reviewed policies around community benefit fund recommendations and chose to reduce them in real terms compared to when they were first launched. And, of course, we’ve seen what happened with Scotland’s largest auction of offshore energy options where it’s very possible that the Scottish Government left many billions of pounds on the table due to undervaluing those assets.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see the manifestos of most of the political parties (including the SNP) ahead of the elections next month but on this topic I’ll be paying particularly close attention. It’s simply not enough to call for more powers but to not lay out what to do with them and I am concerned that what the parties would do with them would just perpetuate the rip-off that the energy sector is. Powers must be used with purpose and that purpose should be not to serve the already wealthy and powerful, but All of Us.